Mindbenders by Ted Krever Read Free Book Online Page A

immediate resignation, followed by the Russians, English and US State Department spokespersons rejecting her offer and the Pakistanis calling it ‘a foul trick’, followed by a commercial for leaky bowel syndrome.
    Max finished brushing his teeth, pulled down the window shades and placed a glass of water on the floor. Then he sat down lotus-style next to it. “I have a ritual to try to get to sleep. Do you disturb easily?” he asked.
    “I don’t think so,” I said.
    Of course, he didn’t say he was going to hum. Hum to the point that you could feel it in the walls and floor, hum to where the vibration through the mattress felt like one of those magic fingers things. At one point he started humming two notes at the same time, humming harmony with himself. Just as I was about to say something, he opened his eyes again, fixed on the TV.
    “—Illinois officials are scrambling to explain how they executed the wrong man in a state prison on Friday. Marco Velez, serving five years for tax evasion, was executed despite what one guard called his ‘hysterical’ claims of mistaken identity. Prison officials could not explain how guards removed Velez from the wrong cell after checking his fingerprints, which didn’t match the execution order. The attorney general’s office is trying to figure out whether executing Jack Slayton, the actual condemned man, would now constitute double jeopardy.”
    “That’s one, isn’t it?” I asked.
    “They saw fingerprints that weren’t on the page,” Max nodded. “They saw a different cellblock number.” And he closed his eyes and resumed his freaking Ommmm harmonies.
    I’d known the man almost a year off and on and this was the first time I knew his name was Max. It wasn’t like he was holding out on me—this was just the first time I’d ever relied on him for anything. After about fifteen minutes, he opened his eyes and unfolded himself. He started pacing slowly back and forth in front of the window,  like he was looking out even though the shades were down.
    “Aren’t you tired?” I asked. I certainly was—I just couldn’t go to sleep while he was pacing like that.
    “I’m always tired,” he said and, all at once, it came to me: this isn’t a man who can’t sleep tonight ; this is a man who never sleeps. With the greenish light leaking through the blades across the window, he looked like hell. Worn out, dried out, dragged to pieces. His hair was a mess, dark and spiky and sticking out in all directions. His eyes were bloodshot, sunken into deep caves and they didn’t shine like eyes should shine. “Too many voices in my head,” he muttered, staring out the closed window.
    “Ooh I forgot,” I needled. “All those hotel rooms. All those tourists thinking .”
    “It’s not funny,” he muttered limply, like he had zero hope I could ever understand. Which, of course, made me want to.
    “What’s it like?”
    “What?”
    “To know everything .”
    “Ha!” he spit. “I have a universe of information and a flyspeck of knowledge. I hear everything they’re thinking, everyone around us, all the time. But that’s not knowledge. It’s excuses and resentment and the lies they tell themselves to avoid whatever they’re afraid to think about.”
    He pointed to our left. “The man over here traveled three hundred miles to a specialist; he’s getting the results tomorrow morning. He has cancer—I can feel it in him. I can visualize the tumor, though I don’t know the name of the organ that’s hosting it.” And as he talked, it was like the wall dissolved away and I saw the guy lounging on the bed in the next room, eerie content, leafing through sales brochures like nothing was wrong in the world. “Is he thinking about cancer? No. Living a better life? No. He’s thinking: Plasma or LCD? Plasma can burn-in ; that really concerns him. He’s dwelling on it. He won’t live long enough to pay the thing off.”
    “Which isn’t a bad reason to buy one,” I